Types of causation

Galileo Thermometer

The questions whether it is possible to explain actions by causes, be it regular causes or one-time causes, and whether reasons are causes of actions or whether they are something different have dominated the debate in the analytical philosophy of action during the 1960s to 1980s. Starting point of the debate was that the idea of cause involved was Humean. Other concepts of cause were ignored. This may have been obvious, because then positivism and critical rationalism were the dominant views in methodology, but it made that the Humean idea of causation acted as an undiscussed background, to be accepted or rejected. However, employing other types of causation not as ways to oppose the Humean idea but by seeing them as serious equivalent alternatives might have given the debate another turn; alternatives that would not only apply to human actions but to all types of events. For instance, we could analyse what humans do by employing the Humean idea if we see it as behaviour and with the help of an alternative idea of cause if we see it as (intentional) actions. Which idea of cause is most relevant depends then on your research question and objective. I will not elaborate on this here, but what types of causality are there actually? Here are some alternatives to the Humean approach.

- One doesn’t need to accept that certain events (causes) are always followed by certain effects. It can also be that causes act in accordance with probabilistic regularities: C causes E if and only if the probability that E follows C given some suitably chosen background is higher than the probability of E when C is absent in that situation. However, in fact this probabilistic causality is a variation of Humean causality.
- Counterfactual theories of causation state that if an event C had not occurred, event E would not have occurred. Or, alternatively, an effect E would not have happened without the cause C. This type of causality has especially been elaborated by David Lewis in his 1973.
- The manipulationist or interventionist approach of causation sees cause as an action or intervention that brings about a certain effect. James Woodward, one of the most important current advocates of this approach defines it this way: “Roughly speaking, if C causes E, then if we (or nature) were able to manipulate C in the right way, there would be some associated change in E.” (Woodward 2021, p. 76) The word “nature” in this definition makes already clear that this type of cause does not basically suppose a human actor that brings about the effect. Central is the idea of intervention and such an intervention can also have a natural origin. Especially this idea of causation seems to be useful for understanding causation in action.
- Mechanical or process theories of causation see the connection between cause C and effect E as dependent on the structure or the process in which C and E are involved. As Woodward 2021, pp. 96-97 puts it: “The basic idea of such approaches is that … whether C causes E has not to do with a contrast or comparison of some kind between a situation in which C and E occur and an alternative situation in which C does (or would) not occur, but rather just has to do with what happens in the situation in which C and E occur. … [Such] theories appeal to spatiotemporal and/or ‘mechanical’ features that are present when the relationship between C and E is causal.” Here I must think of Fred Dretske’s distinction between structuring cause and triggering cause that I discussed in a blog many years ago. I do not want to go into this distinction here, but Dretske’s triggering cause is a good example of a cause in the sense of mechanical or process theories of causation. For instance, when a temperature drop causes to occur certain events in a thermostat, while in turn these events cause the furnace to ignite, then we can call these events the – triggering – cause and that the furnace ignites the effect.

In this blog I have discussed several types of causation as alternatives for Humean causation. The three first types discussed see causation as making a difference while the fourth type sees it as a structural or processual connection. To my mind it is not so that in each situation only one type of causation is relevant, but as said, which type is relevant depends on your research question and objective and on your approach as well. In addition, which type or types of causation are relevant depends also on the nature of the object studied, for example whether we study human actions or physical objects and events. Having realized this would have made the debates on the Explanation-Understanding Controversy more fruitful. Realizing this can make future debates more fruitful.

Sources
Without always explicitly saying it, I used and sometimes quoted the next sources:
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Metaphysics of Causation”
- Wikipedia, “Causality[”
- Woodward 2021, chapter 2